Under pressure – F1 urgently needs to select new tyres supplier

Formula One urgently needs to decide which tyres manufacturer it will use next season, according to team bosses.

Ferrari chief Stefana Domenicali admits the process of choosing which tyres manufacturer will take over from Bridgestone has now gone on far too long and a decision must be made before the Canadian Grand Prix.

He said: “I mean we are pushing like hell in order to make sure this is happening every day in advance.

“But unfortunately negotiations are still going on and I really hope that it’s not going to be another [race] weekend. We need to sort this out this week because it is already very, very late for us.”

The race to become the new supplier appears to have been narrowed down to Michelin and Pirelli, but a decision had been expected as early as the start of last month.

The long uncertainty has created increasing problems for teams in their ongoing development work for 2011, with designers desperate to know the exact details of the tyres the cars will run on.

Mercedes GP boss Ross Brawn revealed teams have tried to alleviate these problems by presenting the would-be suppliers with the specification of tyres they want for next year, with squads keen to see the rubber be as close to the 2010 Bridgestones as possible.

He said: “What the teams have done, which I think is the right thing, is produce together a technical specification of the tyre we want.

“So there is a document which we have all contributed to which is a broad spec of the sort of tyre that we want which means there is a single directive to the new supplier as to the type of tyre that’s needed.

“And that means that we can continue with the development of our cars. Our cars are being designed around the current tyres because we have no other information.

“So I think everybody wants a tyre to come in which has similar characteristics to the current tyre – certainly physical construction characteristics, whether the compounds are quite the same is another matter.”